Performance of Windows XP, Windows Vista and Apple's Leopard Computers under a Denial of Service Attack

Distributed Denials of Service (DDoS) attacks are increasing over the Internet, where the attacker consumes all the resources of the network or the victim computer, thus preventing legitimate users from accessing the services. This paper compares the impact of a DDoS attack, called Land Attack, on popular operating systems such as “Windows XP”, “windows Vista” and “Apple’s Leopard”. We investigate and compare the built-in ability of these operating systems in withstanding land attacks at different loads of Land Attack traffic. In this experiment, we measure the exhaustion of the computing resources, for the above mentioned operating systems under varying loads of the Land Attack traffic. Our results show that Windows XP operating system was most robust, and capable of surviving the ICMP-Land Attack when compared with Windows Vista and Apple’s Leopard operating systems.